


Cherries and Wine

by objectlesson



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Blood, F/F, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, I feel like that's just always gonna be a tag if I'm writing Illya, Injury, Internalized Homophobia, Scar Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 20:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19383727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: “If you die I am going to kill you,” Solo assures her, taking off her camel-hair jacket and draping it across Illya’s trembling body, fingers in the sweaty blonde mess of her hair. “So please stay awake."





	Cherries and Wine

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to fulfill a Drabble prompt awhile ago and when I went to look back at it/add more I realized it was like? totally complete and lovely as is so I should post it because I love these girls and everyone needs to read more about lesbian 60s spies in love. 
> 
> Raw and unbetaed.

Love  
I said real love, it's like feeling no fear  
When you're standing in the face of danger  
'Cause you just want it so much  
A touch  
From your real love  
It's like heaven taking the place of something evil  
And lettin' it burn off from the rush - _Cherry, Lana Del Rey_

\---

Illya tries not to think too much about the fact Solo is undressing her. 

It’s easier than usual to not think about Solo, right now. It’s probably the concussion. Or the snow. Or the fact she very well may be dying, bleeding out from a massive stab-wound in her arm, the slow and steady throb of it fading the more the snow falls around them. It’s coating her, white against the white of her skin, which Solo is exposing as she cuts a neat incision in Illya’s sweater, gets her thumbs inside it lewdly, and rips it down a straight line. 

She’s lying in Hamstead Heath in her bra, now. Her blood is all over Napoleon’s lovely pale hands as she tears a strip from her sweater and ties it above the wound as a tourniquet. “Same color as your nail polish,” Illya observes, referring to the cherry-red of flesh blood. 

Solo looks at her like she’s crazy, and curses. “I can’t believe that sonofabitch got away,” She says, hands shaking, one of them cupped behind Illya’s neck to keep her head off the frozen ground. 

“I can,” Illya murmurs, teeth chattering. “You are slow, Cowgirl.” 

“Speak for yourself. _I’m_ not the one who got stabbed,” Solo jokes, but Illya can tell by the edge to her voice she’s scared. That means she should be scared, too, but it’s hard to think about or feel any single thing for very long. This is like a dream, Solo’s hands on her skin, under her sweater. There are snowflakes clinging to her shiny black hair, and she’s grimacing, and she’s still the most beautiful woman Illya has ever seen. This is usually a thought accompanied by much bitterness and shame, but Illya is thoroughly delirious with cold and blood-loss right now, the snow and the injury in a race to kill her, and what usually seems important is odd and distant right now. 

_You’re beautiful_ she thinks, but it actually comes out, in Russian. 

Solo coughs, laughs, shakes her head. “And you’re a mess.” 

“Maybe,” Illya says, wincing. “Does not hurt too bad.” 

“If you die I am going to kill you,” Solo assures her, taking off her camel-hair jacket and draping it across Illya’s trembling body, fingers in the sweaty blonde mess of her hair. “So please stay awake. Medics are on the way.” 

Illya nods, and closes her eyes, and lets herself think of the white, snow-coated stretch of the park, no color anywhere save for the wet lush red of her blood, the wet lush red of Solo’s lips. Parted and licked over in worry so many times. 

 

—-

 

When she opens her eyes, there’s an ambulance, and Scotland Yard, and Solo with her eyes cold blue and flashing, hair tucked up into a scarf. She looks glamorous, somehow, even with the blood on the snow behind her, dried to a ugly shit-brown like rust. Illya tries to get up but she’s strapped to a stretcher, and so she sinks back, exhausted, comforted only by the smell of Solo’s perfume on the jacket still tucked around her body. 

The next time she wakes up she’s in a hospital bed at U.N.C.L.E’s London headquarters, and Solo is in a chair beside the bed, her heels kicked off and feet in their nylons tucked up under her while she reads the paper. “Good, you’re alive,” she says without looking up. “I was beginning to worry, with the way you were lying there, like a corpse.” 

“Water,” Illya grinds out, shifting. She's wearing an U.N.C.L.E yellow hospital gown and it’s nauseating her to look at, so she stares at the industrial ceiling instead, wondering how far underground they are. 

Solo sighs, pours a glass from a pitcher on the bedside, and hands it to Illya who takes it with her good arm, the other an infuriating combination of aching and itchy, “Have you caught him yet?” 

“He’s in custody. Probably being questioned by dear Ms. Teller as we speak,” Solo explains. Illya notices she’s wearing very little make up right now, shadow beneath her eyes like bruises, lips wan and pink instead of their usual painted red. She is still, as always, the most beautiful woman Illya has ever seen.

“Why are you not questioning him?” Illya demands to know, finishing the water and setting the glass down with a clumsy clink, muscles still weak, shaking. “I can’t do anything from here but you—you do _not_ need to be here. I do not need a _nursemaid,_ I…” she trails off because Solo is approaching, closer and closer until the flat plane of her pencil skirt where it’s stretched across her thighs presses into the edge of the bed in its sterile white sheets, and she’s leaning over, so her face is inches from Illya’s. To add insult to injury, she _touches_ her, laying her hand over the frantic thud of Illya’s heart, just above the curve of her breast. 

“Eleven stitches. Infection. Frostbite. Tons of antibiotics. You were touch and go there for a minute, Peril, Waverly had to make me leave the room because I broke an IV stand. It was terribly unladylike,” she says harshly, nails biting into Illya’s skin. “So please, don’t tell me you’d appreciate my attention elsewhere. Just. Indulge me, for a moment, will you?” 

Her voice is crisp and the blue of her eyes is so cold compared to the black fire it’s encircling. Illya’s heart pounds and her flesh is burning up under the heat of Solo’s palm, but the words take a few seconds to catch up with her to make sense. “You’re saying—this worries you? You were worried?” It comes out incredulous because _why,_ why should Solo _care?_ This is the nature of the job, necessary collateral damage. Caring is weakness and when Illya is reminded she cares for Solo, she drowns it, silences it. She does not _declare it_ like a sinner at confession. She does not _admit_ to the things she feels, she kills them until they are dead. Of course, they rise again after three days like an impure Christ. But that is not the _point. “Worrying_ about injuries on the job—it’s weakness, Cowgirl. You know this.” 

“ _Injuries_ do not worry me, _you_ worry me,” Solo snaps, further exposing things Illya would never expose. It feels like _she’s_ the one being stripped, somehow, like Solo revealing herself is revealing her own ugly, long-buried secrets. It does not help that Solo is pulling at her blankets now, fingers deft but careful, tender but firm. “You’re _covered_ in scars, Illya. Covered in them. I mean, I have my fair share, we all do,” she says furiously as she exposes Illya’s shoulder. “But this…do you _throw_ yourself in danger? Do you _try_ to hurt yourself?” She digs her thumb into a quarter sized marbling of scar tissue under Illya’s collarbone, white and shiny, from where she was once burnt while being tortured. Under that, there’s a cross-hatching of knife slices, shallow and deliberate, from another time she was unsuccessfully interrogated. To her, these are memories of strength, times she chose not to break, but the way Solo is looking at her makes them feel like failures. 

“Sometimes,” she says, teeth grit, because certainly, that is part of the job, too, right? Hurting oneself? Punishing the flesh for existing, for failing, for growing old, for being imperfect, for letting her _down?_ It seems absurd to separate that from being shot or tortured or stabbed or lying in the snow bleeding while the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen touches her with trembling hands. Taking charge of her pain is something she’s always done, to lessen the sting of being hurt by her father, by her country, by ballet, by men, by the KGB. Pain is not just something that’s done _to_ her. It’s something that she does. Something that is done, simply, without agency. “You don’t? You are going to look me in the eye, here, and tell me you have never hurt yourself to see if you still feel?” she accuses, reaching up with her good hand and encircling Solo’s wrist, clutching until she feels something give, and Solo lets go. 

There are other scars, on her arms, her ribs. Solo shifts to touching them, tracing them each through the sheets like secrets, brow pressed to Illya’s, breath coming out on her lips, rough and terrified and tear-wet. Illya does not know what is happening, why the thought of her administering controlled lacerations to her own fucking body should make Solo _angry,_ of all things, but here she is. Crying, as Illya has never seem her cry, lips chapped, eyes so tired. 

“You make me insane,” she says, and then she drops her head and places her wet, soft mouth open over the burn scar. 

It’s so unexpected Illya gasps, arches her back, freezes. Solo stays there for a moment, black hair tumbling over the sheets, reminding Illya of her own blood on the snow when it dried. Solo’s mouth is sucking, her teeth are digging in a bit, and then she’s moving lower, mouthing over other scars, tugging Illya’s hospital gown over her shoulder so she can expose skin and reach more. 

Every logical voice in Illya’s brain is telling her to stop this. To fling Solo off, to tell her to stop acting hysterical, to keep her wild judgements and absurdity about her body to herself. But it feels so overwhelmingly _good,_ to have those lips on her skin as she only imagines in her weakest, most honest moments, that she cannot move. She just lies there, eyes stinging, hands fisting in her sheets, while Solo undresses her yet again, mapping out her skin in scars, in kisses. 

At some point Solo curses, unzips her pencil skirt, and climbs up onto the bed on her knees. “You don’t even know,” She says, softly kissing up the inside of Illya’s bicep, where the muscle involuntarily flexes at the tickle of her hair. “You don't have any fucking idea.” And she’s right, Illya does not know, she knows nothing, only that this impossible occurrence she thought could not happen is happening, but in the way dreams happen: Fractured, faded, through a haze. Not as she imagined it when she let herself do such a thing, but easier and bloodier all at once. 

Solo licks over the long, vertical scar from Illya’s wrist down to her elbow, and Illya’s pillow is wet with tears, her chest shaking, her mind a blur of _don't stop, please,_ which is perhaps the single most desperate and mortifying thing she’s ever thought on repeat. 

“Stop getting hurt,” Napoleon says, pressing her hot cheek into Illya’s palm. “And most of all, stop hurting yourself. You brilliant, terrible madwomen.” 

And Illya wishes idly and for a moment Napoleon were wearing her usual red lipstick, so she could be covered in it, and each of these kisses would be temporarily marked on her skin, like blood to wash away later with the rest. 


End file.
